Michael Rittstein is one of the “masters” of the post-war generation who transformed the Czech artistic landscape. Through his personal work, Michael Rittstein has instilled new narrative and expressive forms marked by an extreme dialogue between color and movement. In his painting studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, he also contributed to the training, for seventeen years, of an important number of artists of the “new” generation and participated in a lasting affirmation of Czech figurative expressionism… between tradition and revolution. There is something very “Czech” and yet very universal in the work of Michael Rittstein… which explains why his paintings are today part of prestigious Czech and foreign collections; including the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Albertina Museum in Vienna.
As a third part of retrospective exhibitions on his prolific work, the Kampa Museum in Prague is presenting, until March 10, a set of works produced mostly over the last three years and coming from private collections. The exhibition “Feet on the Table” is the unique and ephemeral opportunity to admire monumental works in the privileged setting of a historic and major institution in Prague… along the Vltava… a stone’s throw from the Charles Bridge.
Fable, ritual, hallucination… humanity and animality regularly meet and merge in the work of Michael Rittstein. What strikes the viewer at first glance is the effervescence of the compositions… a lively and energetic dimension. The exhibition becomes a carnal experience since the spectator finds himself facing one of the often monumental paintings which are expressed both on the surface and in thickness. The touch is both meticulous and ample with an overflow of material and body towards the outside. The composition seems to be projected forward… taking the viewer to task. There is no possible passive posture in the face of his explosive works. The spectator is part of a living organism but also often of an implacable mechanism… There is a certain violence and constraint since the speed is imposed and the spectator has no choice… caught up in the movement… digested like a food through the exhibition circuit… progress and evolution. It is a frantic race between man and nature… a quasi-primitive and animal state which makes the world turn like the cogs of a single body… society for machine… rural and urban… humanly inhuman… paradoxical.
Just like facing a landscape, there are two ways of approaching the work of Michael Rittstein… two narrative formats… first of all an overall vision, striking and almost overwhelming in relation to the posture of the spectator who finds himself miniaturized and absorbed… an abstract sensation. Then we enter into the work and its details. The figures appear, following fluctuating and evasive proportions… positions ranging from dynamic to erotic. The body is formed, deformed, supple like articulated dolls, all rounded, and becomes an automatic and sensual dance… a fluid… which sometimes moves from one canvas to another like a wave or a resonance… because Rittstein’s works have a luminous but also sonorous vibration. This contributes to an intense and inner experience of this figurative and undulatory expressionism. There is no silence and no absence. It is music and sometimes even a din that emerges from this mechanical and hectic order. Piano, guitar… mix with bursts of voices or animal cries, sex, the roar of motorcycle engines, tractors, rockets… it’s the excitement of the world. Beyond the sound, the works even have a taste… since the colors and the thick touch arouse a form of appetite… sweet, salty, tangy… The spectator places his feet on the table like a still life… the vestiges of a meal taken to the point of excessive gluttony or even nausea. It is also a smell… not just that of paint but that of powder, gasoline, animals and bodies… saturating the space. The spectator’s experience then becomes multisensory… complete and stunning.
Ultimately, it is a portrait of man as a social animal… immersed in a metamorphic daily life where everything is real and unreal… everything is personal and impersonal… everything becomes plausible… everything coexists and everything collides… everything is superimposed like an orchestra… to bear the weight of life and society… a cruel beauty… a noisy harmony.
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ABSTRACT MIMESIS 